


Conversation

by Onyxed



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-09
Updated: 2019-08-09
Packaged: 2020-08-13 09:37:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20172112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Onyxed/pseuds/Onyxed
Summary: AU drabble in which Beth shows up in Alexandria and she and Daryl have a conversation.prompt: conversation





	Conversation

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Yes, this is a riff on the speech Spike gives in BTVS. Different fandom, different context, slightly altered dialogue. *puts on sunglasses indoors* 
> 
> Also this isn’t set anywhere in particular beyond that they are in Alexandria, its still safe and I’m gonna go ahead and say in this universe Negan does not exist. 
> 
> And lastly this is inspired by a prompt list I made for myself. And I didn't really have the energy to proof read so, please have mercy.

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They’re standing only a few feet apart in a kitchen that to her seems immaculate and makes her feel out of place. She never could have pictured Daryl in a place like this, she’d only ever known him in squalor and decay. Beth looks at him now, her gaze hard and analyzing. He’s still beautiful to her, and the sight of him still makes her heart jump around irregularly in her chest. Her hands are itching to touch him but instead she grips the machete handle on her hip that much tighter. 

“I wasn’t there when it mattered.” 

His voice is barely more than a whisper, but the room is so quiet and his voice so rough that the sound still sends an invisible shiver across her skin. He means to look at her when he says it, but he can’t. Because she isn’t saying anything. She won’t refute his words or comfort him. She can’t. 

They both remember that time, a blur of what was perhaps months. Where they fell in love and then fell apart. A time neither of them has ever been able to forget, for all the worst kinds of reasons. 

Daryl had buried her a long time ago. In the trunk of a random car surrounded by walkers. He thought if he ever saw her again it would be in death and then he could finally say it…

“You were there.” She says simply, not even really sure what she means by it. It just comes out, all even and matter of fact.

Its then that he finally meets her gaze. Her blonde hair is long and curling around her face but he can still see the scars. The one cutting across her cheek and the other shadowed a few inches above her right brow. Daryl shakes his head, a slow and barely perceptible motion. “Never when I shoulda been.” His look is so intense, the one that made her feel naked sometimes. But she doesn’t look away because she’s not that little girl anymore, and over the past few years it's how she’s stayed alive. She doesn’t know how to back down anymore. 

“At the cemetery,” he continues. “I shoulda stayed with you. At the hospital with Noah, I should’ve gone in anyway. And then again later, with Dawn…” His leans away from her for a moment, as if physically distancing himself from the moment in his memories. It makes his hair fall forward a little, over his face. Its longer than she remembered and it was the first time she noticed the faint white streaks in it and along his chin. Somehow those small tendrils of distress on him jarred her more than the scars, distantly she wondered if it was because it reminded her of the time that had passed between them. A giant chasm of years that had made them different people. “I didn’t even get to speak to you that day.” He says finally. “I don’t think you even more than glanced at me... Not even sure you noticed I was there.”

“I did.” She interrupts quickly, her voice breaking in the sudden impulse. “I did.” She wants to tell him that she thought of him every day that she was gone. That sometimes she’d wake up and his name would be on the tip of her tongue. Instead she says, although her voice sounded detached even to her own ears, “I never doubted you’d come back for me.” Deep down they both knew it was an accusation. Because it had taken so long, and they lost so much time, and when he did come it was much too late- though neither knew it yet. She thought maybe that was the problem with them, always acting like they had time. 

Daryl looks down at his hands. For once they weren’t caked in mud and death. He looked at her shoes again and saw how they were. It was ironic, even at such a tense moment, the house around them was the kind that she might’ve wound up living in if the world hadn’t gone the way that it had. It was all pale gray walls and flooded with light. And she looked the most out of place. There was grit on her skin and stains across her clothes, she had a gun strapped to her left hip and machete hanging from the other. She looked how he used to, and it grips him then that the version of himself he compared her to was his past, he didn't need to be that person anymore. It broke him even more to realize that because he hadn't been there for her, she had to become like that. This angry and placid sort of force that didn't know how to die but always seemed to be walking with it.

“Do you remember the last time I touched you?” 

It was a question she hadn’t expected. Beth had thought about him so much over the past few years, his touch was so faint in her memory. “At the funeral house, you carried me all over the place.” She closed her eyes for a moment, “ I don’t think we touched after the herd came.” She did remember that though, how it felt when he touched her. The strength of his hold and instinct to protect. Her chest ached. 

“Since the night they took you… Every night I dreamt I saved you... I’d fall asleep tryin’ to remember what you felt like. And sometimes in my dreams you’d run to me and… I could feel you like you were really there. Like I could keep you safe again.” She watches him as he looks down at his hands again. “When we all came to get you, I thought about what I would do. If you’d let me hold you or if I would wait ‘til we were alone and if I’d even have the courage to do more than hold you’re damn hand…” He gives a small laugh but its sardonic and she knows it, because knowing what he was thinking before made everything that happened after that all the more awful. 

She watches him carefully as he pushes himself off the ledge of the table to stand, almost instantly closing the space between them. He’s not as tall as she remembered, in her memories he always towered over her. But as he slowly lifted his hands to her face, his roughened fingers carefully brushing back the curling pale strands from her face, she notes that he’s now only maybe five or six inches taller than her. Distantly she wonders if that means she’s grown or if time had warped her impression of him. She doesn’t have long to think on it because he’s speaking again and he’s so close his breath is hot against her cheeks and she can feel the vibrations of his voice against her. 

“The last time I held you, you were limp in my arms and your blood was hot on my hands.” His voice is shaking and she can see the glassiness of his eyes as he remembers that day. “You couldn’t feel me, but I felt you…” His hands grips her face, his thumb ran wet over the deep scar on her cheek and she realized that she was crying too. “I got to hold you again but you were dead in my arms.”

She had wanted to be angry with him, and over the past few years she thought she always would be. Beth put her hands firmly over his as she closed the space between them, pressing her mouth full against his. He didn’t freeze like she thought he might. He'd always had timid nature toward intimacy, even the completely banal kind. It had always been a struggle, to try and reach him through the thick guards he built around himself. But now he kissed her back just as desperately and he heart flipped in her chest. It was actually a little strange and almost surreal. She’d never kissed anyone with a beard and was surprised by the slight scratch of it. And though he was still chorded with muscle there was a new kind of softness to him that hadn’t been there before. A consequence of the kind of safety a place like Alexandria provided, he no longer lived off the land the way they had before and he didn’t spend days on end running for his life. 

Somehow she reveled in it, as his mouth slanted along her jawline to move down her neck she pressed her face into his hair. In that moment she could be happy for him, that he’d found some semblance of safety. The kind that she knew he’d never had in all his life, before or after the world came apart. She had wanted that for him, even when she thought she resented him. His hands tugged at her flimsy threadbare shirt as he fought to first tug it down and then pull it over her head. Soon he was kissing and sucking at her breasts and the world seemed to slip out from under her. She hadn't expected that. Beth felt her head loll back as she arched up into him, her hand distractedly yanking at the collar of his button down shirt. 

Daryl yanked off his vest and shirt as best he could while still bending Beth back almost painfully against the counter top. His hands fumbled at the waist of her jeans as he kissed at the exposed skin of her torso. “Take ‘em off.” He growled and Beth didn’t hesitate as she stood up to slide them off. Daryl didn’t get as far as he maneuvered her around to sit on the table he’d been leaning against earlier. He undid his belt and buckle and his pants felt slanted around his calves and ankles.

Beth hopped up on the table and he tried not to think about how she knew that was where he wanted her and whether in those years apart she’d done this with someone else. Instead he focused on how she opened up and reached for him, bringing him into her warm and very much living body. He wanted it to be sweeter, he wanted to be good to her. At the very least he had wanted to make love to her in a bed where they weren’t likely to be ogled by someone who happened to peer through the kitchen window. Those thoughts flew from his mind as she rocked her hips forward, pulling him deeper into her body as she keened painfully sweet into the air. 

The heavy table scraped loud against the floor with each thrust and Daryl tried to force himself not to close his eyes eyes he drove into her. He watched her face and every second of pleasure that flittered miraculously there. With every thrust he's burying himself in her, trying to keep them together for as long as he can. He doesn't ever want to be without her again. She opens her eyes for a brief moment to look directly at him, and its all unmistakable. Blunt and defined. They were making love, because they wanted each other, and probably had ever since that night in the shed. Too soon it was too much and his body fell forward, his hips spasming in one two three hard final thrusts as he spilled himself inside her. Daryl looked up at Beth and was on the verge of apologizing when he saw her face, eyes closed and mouth open as she breathed heavily. He hadn’t been sure if she would cum, and in those first few seconds after he came he was worried she hadn’t. But he felt her walls spasming around him like aftershocks and he knew then that she had. He fell into her a little, his head resting on her shoulder. Her arms came up around him, holding him close. Her fingers combed distractedly and soothing through his hair. His body ached but he didn’t want to move yet, he wasn't ready. The truth was he felt safe, there in her arms. He remembers that day, getting drunk on moonshine, when she braced herself at his back. It had been like a promise. She wasn’t holding him together, but she gave him a safe place to come undone. She was always there for him, even when she wasn't. Even when she couldn't be. 

“I was angry with you.” She said finally, her voice soft like he remembered and he clenched his fists at her sides. Bracing himself for whatever she wanted to throw at him, even if she decided to shove him away. Instwead her fingers continued to stroke his hair comfortingly. “Because it took you so long to come for me, so long for us to get here… For not having faith in me, the way I did in you.”

He thinks about the day she disappeared, how he ran himself bloody looking for her. And the day Dawn shot her, how he tried to run with her lifeless body and how he hadn’t hesitated- for the first time in his life- to kill another living person as he put a bullet in Dawn’s head. 

“I was angry at everything we lost… Daryl?”

He lifted his head to look at her. “Don’t ever let me go.” Her small face is serious but he doesn’t say anything. He never really needed to, she just knew. He’s gentle as he lifts her off the table, stepping unceremoniously out of the tangle of pants around his legs before carrying her to the bathroom. He watches her as she turns on the water and her surprise when it falls in a lukewarm waterfall in front of her. It’s tender as he washes the dirt and grime from her hair and skin, in contrast with their coupling before. She isn’t surprised by his sweet gestures, she’d seen flashes of it before. Always knew it was there under the surface, the facade of the cold and dispassionate survivor. This part was hers, she thought, before pressing her lips to his shoulder as the water washed away the last of the soap, and with it the past and resentment. It was gone now, they could live the rest of it together. 


End file.
